Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Atom is an open source "hackable text editor for the 21st Century" developed by GitHub.

Until now, to use Atom in Ubuntu you'd have to compile it but I like to make things easier for you so I've built it on my computer (Nodejs apps can't be built directly in Launchpad PPAs because they need to install external dependencies and Launchpad doesn't allow that) and uploaded it to a PPA, for Ubuntu and derivatives: Linux Mint, elementary OS, etc.

Update: initially, Atom could only be built on 64bit (on Linux), but it's now available for both 32bit and 64bit!

Update 3: There are now official Atom 64bit RPM packages available for download.

Atom - a "hackable text editor for the 21st Century"

Atom is text / source code editor based on web technologies and you can tweak its interface with CSS or easily add new features with HTML and Javascript, at least according to its website. The text editor features Node.js integration, allowing you to seamlessly mix usage of Node and browser APIs. And of course, since it's developed by GitHub, it features built-in Git integration.

Other Atom features include:

file system browser;

fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;

fast project-wide search and replace;

multiple cursors and selections;

multiple panes;

snippets;

code folding;

a clean preferences UI;

supports importing TextMate grammars and themes.

As you've probably already noticed, Atom looks a lot like Sublime Text (2/3), a popular, cross-platform text editor that's sadly not open source. In fact, Atom includes many of the features available in Sublime Text - according to THIS, "a lot of the architecture and features have been duplicated from Sublime Text because they're tried and tested. The plugin system works almost the same, but opens up a lot of new features and potential by exposing new APIs too".

Furthermore, both Sublime Text and Atom use a command palette that can be triggered using Ctrl + Shift + P:

Also, both have a package manager, but in Atom, you can browse the packages in a nice UI, learn more about each package, etc.: